Daphne Keller is the Director of Intermediary Liability at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society. Her work focuses on platform regulation and Internet users' rights. She has published both academically and in popular press; testified and participated in legislative processes; and taught and lectured extensively. Her recent work focuses on legal protections for users’ free expression rights when state and private power intersect, particularly through platforms’ enforcement of Terms of Service or use of algorithmic ranking and recommendations. Until 2015 Daphne was Associate General Counsel for Google, where she had primary responsibility for the company’s search products. She worked on groundbreaking Intermediary Liability litigation and legislation around the world and counseled both overall product development and individual content takedown decisions.

This discussion, excerpted from my Who Do You Sue article, very briefly reviews the implications of what I call “must-carry” arguments – claims that operators of major Internet platforms should be held to the same First Amendment standards as the government, and prevented from using their Terms of Service or Community Guidelines to prohibit lawful speech.

Lawmakers today are increasingly focused on their options for regulating the content we see on online platforms. I described several ambitious regulatory models for doing that in my recent paper, Who Do You Sue? State and Platform Hybrid Power Over Online Speech. This blog post excerpts that discussion, and sketches out potential legal regimes to address major platforms’ function as de facto gatekeepers of online speech and information.

Pages

Lately, politicians and newssources have been repeating a persistent myth about, of all things, technology law. The myth concerns a provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, generally known as Section 230 or CDA 230.

In recent years, lawmakers around the world have proposed a lot of new intermediary liability (IL) laws. Many have been miscalibrated – risking serious collateral damage without necessarily using the best means to advance lawmakers’ goals. That shouldn’t be a surprise. IL isn’t like tax law or farm subsidies. Lawmakers, particularly in the United States, haven’t thought much about IL in decades.

This essay closely examines the effect on free-expression rights when platforms such as Facebook or YouTube silence their users’ speech. The first part describes the often messy blend of government and private power behind many content removals, and discusses how the combination undermines users’ rights to challenge state action. The second part explores the legal minefield for users—or potentially, legislators—claiming a right to speak on major platforms.

On Tuesday, in a courtroom in Luxembourg, the Court of Justice of the European Union is to consider whether Google must enforce the “right to be forgotten” — which requires search engines to erase search results based on European law — everywhere in the world.

Policymakers increasingly ask Internet platforms like Facebook to “take responsibility” for material posted by their users. Mark Zuckerberg and other tech leaders seem willing to do so. That is in part a good development. Platforms are uniquely positioned to reduce harmful content online. But deputizing them to police users’ speech in the modern public square can also have serious unintended consequences. This piece reviews existing laws and current pressures to expand intermediaries’ liability for user-generated content.

Pages

""Other countries will look at this and say, 'This looks like a good idea, let's see what leverage I have to get similar agreements,'" said Daphne Keller, former associate general counsel at Google and director of intermediary liability at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

"Anybody with an interest in getting certain types of content removed is going to find this interesting.""

"Daphne Keller, the director of intermediary liability at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, recognises that the current systems in place for flagged content are slow, and says it would be “sensible” for companies to prioritise live video over older content to some degree.

"The regulation continues to put a heavy onus on Internet companies, which are threatened with fines if they do not comply immediately with takedown requests. "The law still sets out a notice and takedown process that strongly encourages Internet intermediaries to delete challenged content, even if the challenge is legally groundless," Daphne Keller, director of Intermediary Liability at Stanford Law School's Center for Law and Society, warned last December.

"If Google rejects a request for removal of a link, the requestor can appeal to his or her country’s regulators or the courts, Keller says. “But there’s no role for the publisher, who put the speech up in the first place and is being silenced” to protest, Keller says.

"As we wrote in our last post, Daphne Keller at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society is writing a series of blog posts raising concerns about how the new rules clash with basic concepts of free speech. She's now written one about the immensely troubling setup of the "notice and takedown" rules included in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

When you give sites and services information about yourself, where does it go? Who else will get hold of it, and what will they use it for? The recent revelations about Cambridge Analytica's acquisition of data about tens of millions of Facebook users without their knowledge or consent have prompted renewed interest in how data about us gets shared, sold, used, and misused -- well beyond what we ever expected. Join us for a SLATA/CIS lunchtime conversation with three experts from Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society as we discuss the legal and policy implications of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and responses from Congress and courts. How can we prevent this from happening again? What new problems might we create through poorly-crafted legal responses?

Vinton G. Cerf is one of the founding fathers of the internet, and on Wednesday, February 28th, he will be on Canada 2020’s stage for an exclusive event.

Tickets are free and open to the public, but available in limited quantities. Click below to secure yours.

Known most for being the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the modern Internet, Vint will join us in Ottawa to talk about online citizenship, the right to be forgotten, and state of the modern internet.

Twenty years ago, the US Supreme Court’s decision in Reno v. ACLU established the framework for internet free speech and liability that remains in place today. This conference will consider the continuing viability of the Reno vision in the face of multiplying concerns about sex trafficking online, terrorist content, election interference, and other forms of contested content.

Privacy and free speech aren't fundamentally opposed, but they do have a tendency to come into conflict — and recent developments in Europe surrounding the right to be forgotten have brought this conflict into focus. This week, we're joined by Daphne Keller of Stanford's Center For Internet And Society to discuss the collision between these two important principles.